William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a prosperous leather merchant in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, England. He attended grammar school, married an older woman named Anne Hathaway, and eventually left Stratford for London to pursue a career in the theater. Legend has it that Shakespeare began his career by holding the reins of horses for theater patrons; in any event, he quickly worked his way up the ranks of his chosen profession. By the early seventeenth century, he had written some of the greatest plays the world has ever seen, and was, along with Ben Jonson, the most popular writer in England. He owned his own theater, the Globe, and amassed enough wealth from this venture to retire to Stratford as a wealthy gentleman. He died in 1616, and was hailed by Jonson and others as the apogee of theater during the Renaissance of Queen Elizabeth's reign.
             Shakespeare's works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare's life; but the paucity of surviving biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare's personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare's plays were in reality written by someone else--Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates--but the evidence for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars. Today, Shakespeare is remembered for the wealth of magnificent poetry and drama he left the world: for his 154 sonnets, for Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and many other plays--including the most celebrated work of literature in the English language, Hamlet.
             Written during the first part o...